It can be tedious to make some changes manually in the ovf file (see the details in the given link above). We all know that manual steps are subject to human error. Moreover, make one script may save your time, launch it and you can enjoy something else instead of waiting for the unzip to be completed, the untar, the push to ESXi host... And who like to do more than once the same tedious job ? Lastly, since Peoplesoft will deliver these VirtualBox Appliances every 8 weeks (!), this task has to be done quite often. So, no way but a script must be written somehow.

You can actually script every single step that I explained in the other blog entry (see the link above). Even the download, within the wget option available on My Oracle Support, can be scripted, as shown below. First accept the licence terms, and download the wget script. This wget script is a shell script, you have to put your user’s password in it, and run it. There’s a timeout though, 8 hours to download all the 8 files (about 24.5Gb), depending of your bandwidth, it may or may not be enough. Mine is not that fast (sic), so I won’t use it for now and the following is assuming the zipped files are already there, previously downloaded by one or other way.

As I showed in the other blog entry, to move from VirtualBox Appliance to VMWare ESXi, I use the VMWare ovftool, so it is also assumed that you have it installed.

To be short, once you have the zipped files and the ovftool installed, you are ready to go.

As shown in the other blog post (see link above), there manual changes in the ovf file – and it can be confusing. Let’s use sed, that will change all at once.

I’ll use a parameter file replace.sed, and a script ova_to_esx.sh (see below). Let’s say your are downloading FSCM92000 image, the zip files name format will be like FSCMDB-SES-85302d_ova_Xof8.zip. The script takes one parameter as input, here it will be FSCMDB-SES-85302d. The destination VM name in VMWare ESXi will also be FSCMDB-SES-85302d. All is in the same folder, zip files, replace.sed and ova_to_esx.sh.

And now, from vSphere Client, you can see the new virtual machine (I added already the CD/DVD drive for further VMWare tools installation): You can see above the HD1 is an IDE, whether the HD2,3,4 and 5 are SCSI (below). No idea why HD1 must be IDE.As of now, you can start the VM and follow the instructions given by the Oracle doc.

Obviously, it’s just an example of script, everyone can adjust, add error handler or more parameters…